Memory Lane

Memory Lane: The Field

In 1978, I turned eight in August. Behind my house sat a nearly 100 acre wood, as A. A. Milne would say. We called it the field, because that’s what it was. Nothing but trees and long tall wheat grass swaying in the breeze as far as my four-foot-something tall eyes could see. Mr. Derryberry, the owner of the glade, told my father once that “he couldn’t even touch it,” the value of the land was so great. My dad had wanted to raise a garden on the half acre or so of the field that bordered our yard and had made him an offer. The old farmer just turned him down flat.

The field was our primary stomping grounds, and apparently had some good history behind it. We used to play in the “ditches” dug into the flat ground, which my mom later told us were Civil War trenches. And we ran, sometimes barefoot, on the darkest tree tunnel that was supposedly inhabited by “witches.” I vividly remember reading the warning sign posted ominously at the entrance, thick with branches, foreboding. “Enter at your own risk!” with bloody skull and bones painted brightly below. Who knows whose hang out that was, but the tunnel represented a part of the old Cherokee road which ran right through the back of our field. A pond about two minutes away was stocked at one time by my dad with all sorts of fish that he would catch and release.

We also ran into the woods to the left of my backyard. We would play in the woods, setting booby traps for anyone who might innocently happen along. We, that is, my sister Lisa, my friend Rhonda and her brother Devon, would pass hours and hours riding our bikes on “Dead Man’s Curve” a dangerously sloped bike trail carved into the brown earth. Digging and searching through the rubble of what we affectionately called “The Dump” for anything that we might use in our ‘house.’ We set up screen door frames without screens between two flexible trees, made kitchen tables out of discarded plexiglass, set up ‘shelving’ with what turned out to be a dangerous substance called asbestos. And there we would place our broken ‘knickknacks’ freshly dug from the depths of God knows what kind of pollution. (And how is it that our parents thought this was harmless behavior, rooting through trash from an earlier generation?) But be assured, my parents came through our ‘houses’ and reveled in our creativity, our masterful rendition of an outdoor house. No roof, but a perfectly swept dirt floor. Seating for four, dishes occupying the shelves, a burned out tv set with the guts wrenched out. You know, the usual.

These were idyllic times, spent fashioning the future in our imaginations, in the 100 acre wood. Once when I was nine maybe, Mr. Derryberry tractored down several hundred trees and piled them into a huge great heaping mass of pine logs and branches pushed together. We quickly fell to the very important job of researching these cavernous spaces, and moving our old ‘house’ onto our new ‘ship.’ I always had an important function: because I was the smallest of the group, I got to be the scout. Talk about scary! Spiders, snakes, who knows what was sharing that pile of logs with us? We played the whole summer there, in the shade of the towering pines of that lived, respectfully keeping our distance from the electric fence which now housed cattle and had been the impetus for our ship’s creation. The cow that came to our front yard to graze, now that’s another story!